Many anxious immigrants in Los Angeles avoided public spaces amid a flurry of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on workplaces across the Southland. Dozens of people have been detained in what the Trump administration calls lawful immigration actions. KCRW gets a report from journalist Benjamin Gottlieb.
The San Fernando Valley has many hubs of Latino immigrant life in LA. Who was out over the weekend?
Not very many people. You walk down some major streets in the Valley, like Van Nuys Boulevard, for example, it was an absolute ghost town. Really bizarre. No one was walking around. Business owners were just standing outside, waiting for customers.
Van Nuy Blvd. was unusually deserted on Sunday, two days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested dozens of immigrants at multiple locations around LA. Photo by Benjamin Gottlieb.
But there were some folks out: people who really need to be, like lower-income workers such as street vendors and day laborers. At the Home Depot in Panorama City, there’s typically a little microeconomy with day laborers and the folks who support them by selling food, lunch, fruit, etc.
I spent some time chatting with some day laborers, and I had a long conversation with someone who is not documented and from Mexico. He does general construction work, and he didn't share his name with me because he's really concerned about what might happen to him. He told me that for his work, you really just have to get out of the house and wait to be hired. That's the model. But he's considering changing his behavior. There's a group that he's part of on WhatsApp where day laborers are sharing work sites, and that's because they're just really afraid to be physically out in the world and caught in a raid.
There's a sense you might be detained at any time if you’re an immigrant. There's also this sense of hopelessness and anger.
Are those feelings mainly from the undocumented folks, or is it pervasive?
It really is all immigrants, and that's because the enforcement strategy right now is so different than it has been in the past few years, and that includes the past Trump administration. What seems to be happening now is that ICE will have a warrant for one or two individuals, and then grab anyone in the vicinity of those folks.
I walked into an organic juice bar in Van Nuys that Jonathan Reyes and his family owns and operates. He's from Honduras and he's in the country legally, and he told me that his business has been very slow. People no longer feel safe going out and shopping. In fact, he says he’s seen a 70% drop in business the last couple months, and he had to toss about $600 worth of product over the weekend in one day because it went bad.
You said people are also angry — how is that playing out on the ground?
There have been clashes with immigration officials and law enforcement; they’ve used tear gas and less-than-lethal weapons.
But a lot of people not demonstrating are feeling helpless and upset, too. And the word that's used a lot is kidnapping, not getting due process, just being taken. That's how they feel. There's this consensus that there's not much that these folks can really do about it.
I spoke with an immigration attorney downtown, and one of her clients is from Cuba. He's been in the United States for three years, and he has a work permit and an open immigration case, so you would think he has nothing to fear.
But he is fearful.
He's afraid to go back to work, and said he would rather stay home. He told me that last Friday, he went home from work when news of the first raids happened. He closed his office, and many folks that are like him that have pending cases, they also closed down. They also left work. He's in the food business.
You can imagine how this has the potential to have a huge impact not just on immigrants, but on the overall economy, especially in a city like ours that has an immigrant population of more than 30%.
We’re not using his name due to his pending immigration case. But he told me that he feels like his dreams of coming here to the U.S. are just being crushed, and he's starting to lose faith in the immigration system that supposedly guarantees human rights and protections for folks like him who have come to the United States legally.